Hi @helga19 some fires are caused by humans either deliberately or because they are careless. I don't know about California but most fires in Australia are caused by lightning strikes and trees falling onto powerlines in storms.
It can be very difficult if not impossible to put out a bush fire. Generally speaking no-one actually tries too. What they do is to try and contain the fire to a given area and protect assets within that area as best they can. Containment is usually done either by bulldozing a wide path of clear ground or buy creating a new small controlled fire in advance of the main fire and burn it back towards the main one. Both techniques work to contain a fire in an area if its not too windy. If its windy all bets are off. The bushfire that almost totally destroyed the towns of Marysville, Kinglake and Steeles Creek travelled over 20km in a couple of minutes because the winds picked up the burning embers and dumped them into the dry forest many kilometres in front of the main fire - these are called spot fires and they quickly grow into another fire front. The fire didn't go out until the weather changed after several days. On the day of that fire we could see it from my house which is another 20km away from it. The fire was so big you could see an orange glow and flames going into the air. Embers and ash (fortunately black) were landing on our house.
The worst one I've personally experienced was 1983 called "Ash Wednesday", in that fire there were hundreds of different fires but the effect was that the coastal and mountain regions from near Adelaide, around Melbourne and towards Sydney all burned. In that one we had to stay in my school because the forest around the school was on fire. We didn't get to go home until very early the next morning when our parents were allowed in to collect us.
Thank you for this update and most of all congratulations to you all for the great effort and for the fantastic result.
I will also tag @JavieraAu in this post as she is really concern about this topic.
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Raining here too my friend @ErmesT. We had a few lovely warm days heralding in an early summer feeling but yesterday we had a large destructive storm which crossed most of my home state of Victoria downing trees, knocking out power and tearing roofs off buildings. Today we had a sunny day but the last three hours we've had a huge rain system that has dropped nearly 40mm at my house. Fortunately I live on the side of a mountain so any accumulated ground water goes to visit my downstream neighbours. The world is different now.
2022
